The Wire and Treme creator David Simon has a tremendous post up about President Obama’s reelection that is also a back-door explanation for why Simon’s own work in television. He writes, among other things, that:

America is different now, more so with every election cycle. Ronald Reagan won his mandate in an America in which 89 percent of the voters were white. That number is down to 72 percent and falling. Fifty thousand new Latino citizens achieve the voting age every month. America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can comfortably walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions. The America in which it was otherwise is dying, thank god, and those who relied on entitlement and division to command power will either be obliged to accept the changes, or retreat to the gated communities from which they wish to wax nostalgic and brood on political irrelevance…

This election marks a moment in which the racial and social hierarchy of America is upended forever. No longer will it mean more politically to be a white male than to be anything else. Evolve, or don’t. Swallow your resentments, or don’t. But the votes are going to be counted, more of them with each election. Arizona will soon be in play. And in a few cycles, even Texas. And those wishing to hold national office in these United States will find it increasingly useless to argue for normal, to attempt to play one minority against each other, to turn pluralities against the feared “other” of gays, or blacks, or immigrants, or, incredibly in this election cycle, our very wives and lovers and daughters, fellow citizens who demand to control their own bodies.

This phrase stuck out at me, the idea of people “who can comfortably walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference.” My friend Tyler Lewis and I spend a lot of time talking about the real losses that would come to culture from being “post-racial” if such a thing were possible. It makes characters flatter to insist that their experiences living as a person of whatever race they are have had as little influence on their character and outlook as a sip of water has on the tongue, just as it does so to create characters who represent only racial tropes, uninflected by generation, or geography, or profession, or groups of friends, or cultural exposure. David Simon’s work has always occupied a rare space in between the colorless of race neutrality and the obscurantism of race as the only important fact about a character: his characters lives are shaped by race, including, and sometimes even especially in the case of Jimmy McNulty, their whiteness. And Simon is interested in how living as members of particular races and ethnicities have shaped his characters because he’s interested every single thing about the people he conjures to life on screen.

That ability to be interested in difference rather than intimidated by it, and to approach the things that make someone different from you not as a matter of anthropology but out of desire to know them, is critical to the political distinctions Simon is drawing here. For so long, our politics have been split between ideas like Mark Penn’s theory of microtargeting, which aimed to divide up the population into easily comprehensible interest groups based on shared characteristics, or the uglier, more pervasive strain of thinking that President Obama’s blackness, like that of all African-Americans, is the most defining thing about him. It’s time to abandon that tendency to predict–or diagnose–behavior from a distance maintained out of distaste and fear. And it’s time to embrace a politics oriented towards a genuine desire to understand and appreciate difference, a process that allows for mistakes and clarification as a necessary precondition for growth. It’s made for astonishing television. It could make for transformative politics.

This post discusses plot points from the November 6 episode of Sons of Anarchy.

Sons of Anarchy is a show that’s always at its best when it puts aside complex arms deals, and the Galindo Cartel, and the CIA and focuses on a simple question: what does SAMCRO mean for the downwardly mobile white men and women who are affiliated with the club? Last night, while it had its share of exploding vans and poker club shootouts, and a setup for a devastating assassination, was primarily concerned with that question, and with the question of the aspirations that its main characters have seen slip out of reach.

Nero and Gemma discussed those questions most directly in a series of conversations that heightened their relationship even as Gemma finally reckoned with the fact that she would have to end it on Jax’s orders. “Ex-junkie, ex-con, those six-figure offers were kinda slim,” Nero explained to her of his decision to become a pimp rather than to go completely legitimate. “It’s hard to be a land baron on minimum wage,” Gemma agreed with him. And Nero gently probed the failure of her own dreams. “What about you, mama?” he asked. “Being an old lady’s your life’s ambition?” “My only ambition was to keep moving,” she told him, ruefully. “I was all in from that first ride. Knocked up two months later.”

Gemma’s not a stupid or incapable woman–quite the reverse. But unlike her daughter-in-law, Tara, she’s never had someone direct her considerable talents in a productive decision, or one that could have given her financial independence and legitimate leverage in her marriages. It’s heartbreaking to hear her tell her son, one who has the trappings of power that were his to claim as a man, and as a prince of the club, “I can count the times I’ve been really happy on one hand. You and your brother. Abel and Thomas…I like Nero, Jax. I haven’t felt light in a very long time.” Her price to return to the man who beat her down, and who she’d rather see dead, is pitifully small: a key to Jax and Tara’s house, and permission to see her grandsons. Whether you despise Gemma or admire her tenacity, there’s something crushing about the tiny scale of her dream, and the thought that she may not be able to handle even that. Clay’s predatory grin of triumph when she came home to inject his hands after the ride was a reminder of how high the cost can be for even the littlest ambitions.

Tara, by contrast, spends much of this episode in triumph. “You’re a persistent little gash,” Otto tells her when she returns to prison intent on getting him to recant the testimony that makes the RICO case against the Sons possible. “Yes, I am,” she replies. But one of the fascinating elements of Tara–though I’m not sure whether it’s a deliberate choice or an inability to read the character that’s produced this–is the extent to which being an old lady is a kind of role play for her, or a genuine identity that she’s chosen. When we first met Tara, her connection to Jax was reestablished by the fact that she was being stalked by a man who would eventually try to sexually assault her. Now, taking on the role of his old lady lends her a kind of cold power as she lets Otto masturbate to the sense of her perfume and the touch of her hand, telling her “Unhook my hand…Please. I’m not going to hurt you…Come to me. Hold my hand…I just want to feel a woman’s hand on me one more time. Please.” For someone who sought protection in the club against a rape, there’s something uneasy about watching Tara allow herself to be used as a sexual object for the sake of that club, to see her go home and tell Jax: “It’s just incredibly sad. He’s just emotionally broken. The perfume crushed him. He was sobbing. I think I got through to him.”
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Gabriel Sherman has an amazing piece about the on-air meltdown at Fox News over the decision to call Ohio for President Obama last night, which contains this charming detail:

With neither side backing down, senior producers had to find a way to split the difference. One idea was for two members of the decision team, Mishkin and Fox’s digital politics editor Chris Stirewalt, to go on camera with Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier to squelch the doubts over the call. But then it was decided that Kelly would walk through the office and interview the decision team in the conference room. “This is Fox News,” an insider said, “so anytime there’s a chance to show off Megyn Kelly’s legs they’ll go for it.” The decision desk were given a three-minute warning that Kelly would be showing up.

I suppose when a substantial part of your brand, in addition to hiring commentators for their inflammatory qualities rather than actual credentials, is hiring extremely attractive women, it makes sense to use the assets you’ve invested in. But the decision by the channel last night to break the firewall between its anchors and its decision team on behalf of a contributor, Karl Rove, who helped shepherd hundreds of millions of dollars to influence the outcome of an election and didn’t want to hear the final verdict on his investment, was already a sham, another illustration of a conservative allergy to facts and data. Sending an attractive woman to do that embarrassing work–rather than letting her continue to do her anchoring job, at which Kelly is frequently a credit to the network–on Rove’s behalf, to fake concern for the integrity of election results, and to send her in part so you can get her legs out from behind her desk, is strikingly juvenile and strikingly retrograde.

The bridge is yours.

-Ken Tucker on election night coverage.

-And James Poniewozik.

-Starz in trouble?

-The end of consequences for failing fact-checks.

-Mo Ryan on what to expect from Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome.

Romola Garai, in the course of commenting on some of the regularly-discussed indignities of being larger than a size six in Hollywood, makes two very important points about what our skewed perceptions of beauty do to us:

“Everyone’s aware of it. It’s partly because fashion, film and television have become so interdependent. Increasingly, it’s actresses doing the big fashion advertising campaigns and now there’s no distinction between actresses and models. “There’s no way I could ring up a company that was lending me a red carpet dress and say, ‘Do you have it in a 10?’ Because all the press samples are an eight – I would say a small eight. If you want the profile, you have to lose the weight.”…

The actress conceded that men in the industry also feel pressure to lose weight, referring to a report that Jason Segel, the Hollywood actor, was told to lose 30 lbs for his role in a romantic comedy. She said: “Executives said it just wasn’t credible that anyone would want to have sex with him the way he was. “I think that is such a profound misreading of what people want out of sex and relationships. And I want no part of that. I wouldn’t want to sit in a room and have someone say to my face, ‘No-one is going to want to have sex with you’. No job is worth that.”

That conflation of actresses’ and models’ role is important because it provides a homogenous beauty standard. When there was a clear distinction between how models wore clothes on the runway, and how actresses wore clothes in their version of the real world, that created a continuum between models, actresses, and those of us whose bodies and faces are not our living. Forcing models and actresses to meet the same standards, even though a diversity of body types would make both industries more interesting (a point that’s illustrated to a certain extent by this slideshow of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show), creates a polarized dynamic rather than a range, a right body type and a wrong one rather than the sense that there are a lot of kinds of women who need to wear clothes and can look incredible them.

But even more important is her point about sex. The idea that having good sex is a matter of how you look rather than how comfortable you are in your body, how well you know your needs and desires, is one of the worst, most persistent misconceptions in our mass culture. Good sex is about sensation, about communication, about all kinds of things that are totally disconnected from how well you’re posed while you’re having sex, or how you look in clothes you take off prior to having sex. Denying that means we have worse sex than we deserve in our popular culture, and perhaps as a result, fewer ways to articulate what we want and what would make us feel good. It’s no mistake that Garai is a wonderfully engaged actress in her sex scenes in The Hour, which is back in a couple of weeks, and is terrific, and in The Crimson Petal And The White. Our pop culture would be better off if we had more actresses who thought–not to mention looked–like her, and more people who wanted to write and direct with these ideas in mind.

When I was twelve, President Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination for the second time by asking the convention to “resolve to build that bridge to the 21st century, to meet our challenges, protect our basic values and prepare our people for the future.” In his second inaugural address, he described it as “A bridge wide enough and strong enough for every American to cross over to a blessed land of new promise.” He gave us more of a sense of the Bifröst we could walk along together than what Asgard would look like when we reached it. But last night, for the first time, as the election results rolled in, I felt for the first time like I had a sense of what the twenty-first century coalition might look like, and what we might do with it.

I said towards the end of the evening that this presidential election felt even more like a generational shift to me than the 2008 campaign did. In part, it was because of who voted, and how strongly their preferences leaned. Latino voters made up 10 percent of voters, and 71 percent of them pulled the lever for Obama and Biden. 73 percent of Asian-American voters picked the Democratic ticket. The percentage of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 rose from 18 percent in 2008 to 19 percent in 2012. 2008 wasn’t a fluke: it was a fact of a generational shift, rather than once-in-a-lifetime swell of enthusiasm. It’s not easy to capture that new coalition in a monochromatic splash of red or blue. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real.

The question is what that coalition will do, what they’re offering up a mandate for. The results of last night’s ballot initiatives offer some hints. Maine, Maryland, and Washington voters passed equal marriage rights in their states, the first referendum victories of their kind, and Minnesota voters narrowly resisted an effort to block same-sex couples from marrying. Colorado voters legalized marijuana, and Massachusetts backed medical marijuana–in states where similar initiatives failed, the margins were often quite narrow. As Ben Smith wrote at BuzzFeed, “The 2012 election marked a cultural shift as much as a political one.”

That cultural shift didn’t necessarily signal victory for traditional progressive priorities across the board, even in states President Obama carried. California rejected an effort to ban the death penalty, 53 percent to 47 percent. 55 percent of F.lorida voters supported an amendment to ban public funding for abortion care. Just because 59.8 million of us voted for the same man doesn’t mean we all did it for the same set of reasons, or even that if we did, we prioritized those reasons in the same way. There are conversations to be had, and they’re difficult ones, but I’d much rather have this set of discussions than the ones the Republican party is starting today. And looking, at least at marriage and marijuana, 1996 does seem like a very long way away. We’ve reached new territory. What we build here is up to us.

We’re still waiting for a concession speech from Mitt Romney, who appears to be taking a page from his predecessor in the category of Hilariously Patrician Massachusetts Nominees for President and taking forever to concede. But fortunately, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele are on the case, letting Obama’s Anger Translator, Luther, explain what tonight means:

It feels good to win, though I won’t have coherent thoughts on Obama’s reelection until tomorrow, when we have to get down to business all over again:

The world only spins forward.